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  What’s most striking about these lists is not the disappearance of Chaplin, Clair, De Sica, and Carné, the persistence of Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, and the arrival of Bergman, Antonioni, and Mizoguchi but the supremacy of foreign language or art-house films. Welles has two films in the top ten by 1972 (and why not?), yet both are anti-Hollywood productions. It’s worth adding that in the runners up in 1972, you could find such relatively recent pictures as Hiroshima Mon Amour, Pierrot le Fou, Vertigo, Mouchette, The Searchers, and 2001. Notice that every film, listed and runner-up, is pretty solemn in outlook—apart from The General. Our talking comedies of undying appeal—Trouble in Paradise, My Man Godfrey, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, The Lady Eve, The Shop Around the Corner, The

  1952

  1962

  1972

  * * *

  1. Bicycle Thieves

  1. Citizen Kane

  1. Citizen Kane

  2. City Lights

  2. L’Avventura

  2. La Règle du Jeu

  2. The Gold Rush

  3. La Règle du Jeu

  3. Battleship Potemkin

  4. Battleship Potemkin

  4. Greed

  4. 8½

  5. Louisiana Story

  4. Ugetsu Monogatari

  5. L’Avventura

  5. Intolerance

  6. Battleship Potemkin

  5. Persona

  7. Greed

  7. Bicycle Thieves

  7. La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc

  7. Le Jour Se Lève

  7. Ivan the Terrible

  8. The General

  7. La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc

  9. La Terra Trema

  8. Magnificent Ambersons

  10. Brief Encounter

  10. L’Atalante

  10. Ugetsu Monogatari

  10. La Règle du Jeu

  10. Wild Strawberries

  Philadelphia Story, Midnight, Twentieth Century, To Be or Not to Be (now there is a ten best built for fun)—are not mentioned or remembered. Yet one principle of the book you are holding is that Hollywood has a record of being most entertaining (and most serious) when making comedies. This is a truth that the Academy (the one that gives the statuettes) has had as much trouble with as Sight & Sound polls.

  When I was asked to do this book (as something like a companion to A Biographical Dictionary of Film, first published in 1975), I wondered whether I would be idiot enough to take on another half-a-million-word project. Writing the Dictionary had put me in the position of having to reckon which films—as of then—were keepers. And in some ways, I had caught larger moods: the Dictionary argues that Hawks is very important, and Buñuel and Renoir and Mizoguchi and Ophüls—and it asks, really, what is all the fuss over Chaplin, Griffith, Eisenstein, René Clair (really a faded glory), and so on. It’s not regarded as dotty now to say that Cary Grant is the most intriguing actor in the history of movies—yet in 1975 that was still fanciful.

  So if you think you were right you don’t allow much room for your mind to change—especially as you grow older and shall we say firmer. This is a book that has had to accommodate that ugly process, and it would not have surprised me if I had included just about every film by my favorite directors. I am an auteurist still. But as I began to sketch out lists (and asked advice from others), a number of things struck me—not least that Chaplin and Eisenstein may be in need of some recovery. Those wheels of fashion keep turning. I still think Keaton is funnier, and sadder, but historically Chaplin towers over so much.

  I wondered how different figures and nations would fare, and I started the immense process of reviewing old films. As I worked on the Dictionary, my chief aid was going to the movies—essentially the National Film Theatre in London. There were films on television, of course, but video had not yet begun and it remained very difficult to see certain films. But in doing this book, living in San Francisco, I have access not just to my library of tapes and the libraries of friends but to the resources of Le Video (on 9th Street), one of many outstanding stores in the U.S. There are so many fewer films that are hard to see.

  This means that I go to the movies less often—I see fewer films in real dark, in great prints, on enormous screens. I watch the videos on television, and try to adjust to the diminution. There is no going back, and it may be that film studies is about to enter a time of theater withdrawal. But The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, say, is one thing on video and another being projected on a big screen. I lament the loss, but I know that everything in the business and in the treatment of movies is shifting toward small-screen study. Otherwise sensible people write Ph.D. theses on particular movies without ever seeing them on a large screen. And if their writing is a little dry, or a little short of what I recall as magical effects, well, the Ph.D. is a professional achievement. Is it possible that the movies are going to end up as museum pieces—like the way we now study old newspapers? We should remember that the “meaning” of newspaper content had to do not just with the “news” preserved but with the dailiness of the paper, its feel in the hands, its smell, and its illusion of opening up the grubby world.

  Movies are always of their time—they never again mean as much as on the day they open. So it’s important to Citizen Kane that it was an anxious look at American success at a moment when most Americans guessed an almighty effort was coming for the sake of survival. That effort required positive thinking (the only critic of America who got away with that in those years was Preston Sturges). Similarly, one reason why Gone With the Wind succeeded in 1939 was that it was a step toward preparing Americans for a new conflict. In Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), a white lie is told to people far from home—this enchanted Smith family will not leave for New York. They will stay at home, “right here in St. Louis.”

  The spirit that makes film wants them to succeed now—this weekend above all—and not in that whimsical place, posterity. No one thinks much of fifty years from now, or whether the films will still be seen long after their makers are dead. Yet literary and artistic cultures ask how Dickens, Joyce, George Eliot, and Faulkner are wearing in changing times. It is a marvel to see that things written four hundred years ago are still read or attended to. Will films stand up that long, or are they more perishable? Maybe in the best of our young generation it can be seen and felt that Citizen Kane is as good or as worthy or as much fun as The Great Gatsby, a Frank Lloyd Wright house, an Edward Hopper window, or Louis Armstrong doing “Potato Head Blues.”

  But when I say movies are of their time, I have to agree that they share in our time, too. I have a game with film experts, of asking them not just their official pantheon but the pictures they love the most—like your favorite teddy bear. Chances are, those beloveds were seen between ten and fifteen (years of age). So don’t rule out the possibility that the movies are most fit for kids. Sometimes we stretch our youth unreasonably far—and I think there is an interesting book in how far film people (battling being grown up) are especially prey to that sentimentality. My time was 1945 to 1960, I suppose, and it was American film mixed with French—and then the two together in that new ice cream flavor, Nouvelle Vague. If you were to make a graph of when the films in this book were made, there is a great hump that stands for the thirties, the forties, the fifties. I can try to moderate it, but I do not apologize for it. It may just be that I was lucky when I was young.

  As I said, I re-encountered many films I had not seen for decades. The results were mixed, as you might expect. But when a film reminded me of what it had meant once, that only encouraged me to believe that there might be a tradition in which films are made and seen, where the past naturally enriches the present. Yet is that so? Films are not what they were. Far fewer of us go to see them. Young people coming to this book are being asked to bear with “restrictions” that they resist in the marketplace—silence, black and white, a lot of smart talk, a sense of morality, et cetera. Very few pictures contribute to the overall wonder at films, a thing that existed from around 1920 to
the 1950s, a mood that no one born in that time can forget. Yet many films today are merciless and mercenary, and increasingly they are not even photographed. Story, character, and the innate beauty of the medium are being sacrificed. What does that leave, apart from desperate novelty? Well, The Lives of Others; Eastern Promises; No Country for Old Men; You, the Living… You, the Living? What on earth is that? I can hear you asking. One of the best films of this century, so far. That’s all.

  Of course, the latest films do not fare as well in this book as pictures from the thirties and the forties. Too many new films are gestures trying to grab the interest of kids set on war games and PlayStations. We are so ready for shallow amusement that it may be harder to enjoy profound entertainment (like those comedies I listed earlier). This book may come off as helplessly nostalgic—a tribute to an age that is not coming back. But if Preston Sturges does well at video stores—and he does—what would happen to someone like that today if he offered The Lady Eve?

  Film is now more or less a hundred-year history. A lot of the estimates of quality made along the way seem ludicrous. For instance, I fill quite a bit of space in this book talking about Academy Awards. In part that is because I have found that readers are interested in such things. But in larger part I do so because so many of the Oscar decisions make us so wary of passing judgments. The Best Picture award in its time has gone to Mrs. Miniver, Gentleman’s Agreement, The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, Ordinary People, Terms of Endearment, Driving Miss Daisy, Patton, Dances with Wolves, Braveheart, and Crash. I have to say that the Academy’s opinion seems to me as often wrong as right—and that tells us a lot about how a business system tries to pledge itself to a scheme of quality that it does not quite understand.

  The Academy has a modern face, represented by its excellent archive and research library. It is considering a grand movie museum in Los Angeles. But the Academy still insists on awarding prizes for a type of film that is hardly made anymore. And that is misleading and unhelpful in the intelligent regard for movies in America. In a history of excellence, the Academy shows itself in desperate need of reform. Its annual “march past” is as misleading and as vulgar as the display of weaponry that once attended every birthday of the Soviet Union.

  None of those winners is in this book. Which doesn’t mean that Oscar splendor is always cut off from real glory. Oscar is supposed to have helped American pictures; I think, more often, he has led them astray. So don’t trust anyone’s opinion or what is called history’s verdict. The Birth of a Nation funded the picture business and it gathered together so many innovations in visual storytelling—still, it is shameful. The Night of the Hunter was a crushing failure when it opened. And today it is treasured as an American masterpiece. For those changes to occur, one thing is necessary: you must look and see and think and decide. I hope there will be films in this book you have never heard of. Be ready to be shocked by what I have left out, but try to see what I have offered.

  The last time Sight & Sound polled 145 critics on the ten best, in 2002, this was the result: Citizen Kane, top again, but only five votes clear of Vertigo (46–41), and then La Règle du Jeu (second three times and third once over the decades), the first two parts of The Godfather (now regarded as one film—a natural but sweeping artistic assertion, denying the business reality), Ozu’s Tokyo Story (a welcome newcomer in top tens), 2001, Battleship Potemkin, Sunrise, 8½, and Singin’ in the Rain. That looks pretty good for Hollywood, with six entries, even if 2001 was made in London or Stanley Kubrick’s head, while Sunrise was set in a visitor’s dream of America. Why not? One day we shall see that all movies live in the same place—on a screen, or in dreamscape.

  And 2012? Well, I doubt that Vertigo will have passed Kane—though The Godfather might. (I think the urge is growing in what is supposed to be a modern, technological medium to overthrow a film that will be seventy years old.) I’ll guess that La Règle du Jeu and Sunrise will still be in the top ten. I think Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc will be back. But I look forward to at least one white-hot sensation made between now and then, and as unimaginable now as Kane was in 1936. That’s the year Orson did his voodoo Macbeth up in Harlem. When he was twenty-one. We are famous for our brilliant kids now (or is it just our childlike cool?), but it’s a long time since anyone met a twenty-five-year-old like Welles.

  Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

  Begin as you mean to go on: Practice complete candor. So it was that at one stage in this book’s history I had Abe Lincoln in Illinois as my opening page, trapped by alphabetical order. Now, that is not the worst film you could ever see: It’s Robert Sherwood’s prizewinning play about the young Lincoln, as directed by John Cromwell, with Raymond Massey working hard as Lincoln and Ruth Gordon clearly disturbed as his wife, Mary.

  But then a good friend, Michael Barker (of Sony Classics), was looking at my alphabetical list, and he had the wit and the delicacy to know that Abe Lincoln in Illinois could not be first. That film on the first page of the book—no matter how earnest my support for it in five hundred words or so—could not fail to depress the ordinary heart. “You need something wilder, something far greater or far sillier,” said Barker. He was right, of course (and he did not even suggest a Sony Classics picture!). When I offered Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, his face lit up with the showman’s true excitement. I thank him.

  You can argue that this glorious venture of a film was a kind of going-out-of-business sale at what was then Universal Studios. As television closed in, the staples of old movie entertainment were often jammed together into B pictures. At Universal, the original home of so many haunted creatures, Frankenstein was meeting the Wolf Man. What next? Let the monsters of one genre have at those from another: Let Dracula confront Lou Costello, and see which of them cracked up first.

  The boys are in the railroad shipping business, you see, when they get two very large crates that turn out to hold Drac and Frankenstein’s monster. By now, alas, the creatures are lovable old frauds serving up comic situations for the boys. In turn, that means this is a movie about Lou’s jitters and his total romantic self-absorption. The plot gives him two sophisticated women (Lénore Aubert and Jane Randolph) who would like to get their hands on his love handles, and Lou can hardly tell one sort of touch from another. The other extras are Bela Lugosi himself, looking very dapper as the count; Glenn Strange as the monster; and Lon Chaney, Jr.—that saddest of all actors—as the Wolf Man.

  Charles T. Barton directed (and he was a veteran with the boys), three people were credited with the script, but still Bud Abbott manages to be the most forbidding figure in sight. Deep down, we know that Bud has abused Lou—it is the secret in their films never quite arrived at. So alphabetical order is rescued—with this reminder: Just as the book ends with Zabriskie Point, so it is at the heart of picture romance that Bud and Lou could just as easily have invaded that solemn desert land, or how about Abbott and Costello Meet Persona?

  Ace in the Hole (1951)

  In the biography of Billy Wilder, Ace in the Hole may be the most important picture. His partnership with Charles Brackett dated from Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), which they wrote together for Ernst Lubitsch. It included Midnight, Ninotchka, and Hold Back the Dawn as writing projects, not to mention The Lost Weekend, A Foreign Affair, and Sunset Blvd., for which they had been joint writers as Brackett produced and Wilder directed. And then Wilder wanted out of the arrangement. It was clearly his initiative, and Brackett was bewildered by it to the end of his days. Did Wilder want more credit and more of the money? He got both, so it’s worth asking.

  Wilder would direct and produce a story started by Walter Newman and Lesser Samuels. Set in the American Southwest, it features a fallen newspaperman, Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas), who gets wind of a human-interest story. Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) is trapped in a cave where he was hunting for Indian relics. Tatum will milk the story into a national sensation to regain his position.

/>   Some charges of cruelty and cynicism had been leveled at Wilder already. Phyllis is hateful in Double Indemnity. Walter is not the insurance man we hope for. The nurse and the barman are harsh figures in The Lost Weekend. And we don’t have to spell out the cruelty in Sunset Blvd. But Ace in the Hole goes much further in its portrayal of a kind of gloating malice. Kirk Douglas holds nothing back. In one scene he slaps Jan Sterling (Minosa’s wife), and she snarls, “Don’t do that again, I might get to like it.” It was even Wilder’s plan to redo the studio logo: The arc of stars would rise above, not the famous mountain, but a rattlesnake in the desert sand. The studio killed the idea, but the snake’s poison runs all through this deeply misanthropic film.

  It was shot in New Mexico, in Albuquerque and Gallup, where a huge set was constructed for the cave. Charles Lang was the photographer—John Seitz had been dropped, and Wilder never went back to him. Hal Pereira and Earl Hedrick were the art directors. Hugo Friedhofer did the music. It is a film made under complete control; there seems to be no doubt about the justice in loathing everyone in sight. People are idiots or they are vicious. It is a mercy when Tatum is killed, though the method is hideous—scissors in the stomach—and the scene exploits Kirk Douglas’s masochistic streak to the full.

  What is remarkable is that Wilder is uttering these curses from the pulpit of great success. Is it a boast at being free from Brackett, or a kind of self-loathing for the way he got free? No one interested in Wilder should miss the film, but the public hated it and the Academy turned a cold shoulder (Brackett was president of the Academy!). Wilder took shelter in easier films, softer and stranger (The Spirit of St. Louis), and he did not really come back until the end of the fifties, when he was a comedy director—nothing he would have been accused of in 1951.